Review: Stuck by Chris Grabenstein

Stuck by Chris Grabenstein

Stuck is a delightful, fully dramatized, story built with a twist on the Ground Hog’s Day theme. Jackson is an eleven-year-old fifth grader who is afraid to advance to middle school where a bully promises to make his sixth-grade-year hell. So, he makes a wish to stay in fifth grade and magically it happens—while the rest of his world advances one year further, leaving him behind.

 

At first, Jackson is pretty pleased with what’s going on, except that at the end of his second run through fifth grade, the clock resets for him again and he has to do it a third time. This run through he’s accompanied by a girl who is going through the same experience. Jackson is a pretty headstrong young man who really enjoys shining, so the first several times he goes through the fifth grade, he’s actually pretty happy with himself, excelling in school, getting better and better in sports and music, and generally being a cocky young man. But eventually, having his little sister get older than him, and losing track of his friends starts to beat him down and he begins to look for a way to start growing up again

 

Grabenstein does a great job of showing the emotional growth in Jackson as he slowly progresses from being totally self-centered person to a great young man who is truly concerned with other people and this brings me to my one serious complaint about the story. The eventual solution to Jackson’s problem erases all the character growth he has made in ten years as a fifth grader and for me, that destroyed the entire point of the story. In the original Ground Hog’s Day, Bill Murray was only freed from his calendar-trap when he emotionally grew up and the audience knows he’s going to keep being the great person he has become. But Jackson forgets his ten years of fifth grade and so the superb young man he has become disappears making the whole tale sort of pointless—although it was still a lot of fun getting there.